Hello, I have a G4, 400, OS 9.x that will not boot. It's giving me the gray screen of death with that darn question mark folder. On the last successful boot, it told me there was a "problem with the cache memory" (and I used that opportunity to back up my files). I shut down every night. I reinstall the OS every 6 months. I also run some heavy applications, though generally not at the same time. I do have IE 5, but prefer to use Netscape. Almost all previous cases of the computer freezing can be attributed to browser lockup or Dreamweaver sucking all the RAM out and croaking. Now, is this one of those "fixable by a computer tech at an atrocious rate" kind of problems, or should I just shell out for a new processer chip assembly? Any help is appreciated, KP

Your problems sound fixable by the loose nut behind the mouse (you). Lets start from scrach. You have a backup (smart! I like that!) so lets pop in your OS install CD and use drivesetup to initialize your HD and install a nice clean OS. Than reinstall the apps you REALLY need. Than you can use your backed up data. Next: Reinstalling the OS every six months is unnecessary. don't do that. I suggest instead to keep up on your fastidious file management and don't get caught up loading a herd of oddball apps & extensions you really (really honestly think about it dude) DONT need. Once a month or so you should rebuild the desktop & reboot from a CD and defrag the drives (research and youll find an app that will defrag to your liking). This will do more for you than you think. Allocating ram is important too. See how much ram your operating system is running and subtract that from your total ram. What's left is what ALL open apps can use to run on. That's TOTAL...all added up at the same time. Example: OS needs 50 megs, you have 256 megs ram (you are NOT running virtual memory, if you are TURN IT OFF please and never turn it on again.) this means that you have 206 megs free. You allocated 150 megs to Dreamweaver, so now you have 56 megs free. You allocate 50 megs to netscape, so this means you can have the OS, DW, and NS running at the same time and have pretty much NO memory (6 megs) left to run anything else at all. This is fine if you just keep in mind to RESPECT this limitation. Ram is cheap and you may want to upgrade that before dropping coin on a new zif processor. Incidentally I prefer netscape comm but was compelled to switch to IE & Outlook. It worked out OK, and the surfings better actually. Be sure to set the CACHE to ZERO megs if you have a cable connection or better. It is faster and keeps the cache files from fragging the drive. Hang Ten!

The flashing question mark is a sign that it has simply forgotten the startup disk. Boot from the CD that came with your Mac and re-select the startup volume. If you get an error like "your date and time are incorrect" you have a dead PRAM battery, which is likely the source of this problem. You can get a new one from the sources listed here (yes, the PRAM battery info applies to all Macs, not just old ones): http://macfaq.org/ The cache memory problem is more worrisome. If it truly is a problem with the cache on the CPU, a new CPU assembly *will* probably be the only way to fix it. However, I would be *very* surprised if this was indeed the problem. My guess is that it might have something to do with the first problem, namely, a dead PRAM battery. Your best bet on this is to give us a bit more detail on exactly what this error message said, so we can tell you where to go from here... p

All right. I forgot to mention last time that I've tried booting from disk, a few times, but I'll try a few more times to satisfy myself. It starts to read the disk, then gives up. If that doesn't work, I'll check on the battery. I also never knew about booting from disk once a month, but it makes sense, so I'll put that into practice. Thanks for the pointer. The almost exact message that popped up was "There is a problem with the cache memory. Call an apple technician." Not too helpful. But, you guys are great. This gives me a line of attack, so I can do something instead of just going "durh, I broke it". KP

So I got a new battery and the computer booted up. But it still won't restart unless I remove and replace the battery. If I follow this immediately with a boot disk, it almost gets through it. Then it the disk-destop freezes up. I downloaded and installed TechTool Lite and cleared the PRAM, but it's not making a difference. It can't find any other disk corruption either. The exact message is "The built-in-memory has detected a problem with cache memory". I suppose it's time to take it to the tech. KP

Sounds like a winner to me. Unfortunately, these things do happen on occasion. Oh, just a long shot - you haven't added any RAM recently have you? p

Nope. I haven't made any internal modifications to the tower, including memory changes. The nice part is, I don't feel as if I'm throwing away money now. KP